The invention relates to a method and system for providing and billing Internet services, wherein a user may select among a plurality of service profiles.
The service profiles offered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may differ from one another in various aspects. These aspects include for example the upstream and downstream line rate at which the service provider will allow the user to transmit and receive data at the IP layer, the way he treats each IP packet in the context of an online session (QoS—Quality of Service, Firewall functionality, access rights to certain contents, access rights to certain applications or web-services, right to join a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or a corporate intranet) and the way the ISP treats personal data of the user (privacy-level), the way and extent the ISP exposes the personal data and the identity of the user to third parties (anonymity level), and the way the user wants to pay (selected payment partner and method, prepaid, postpaid, by spending loyalty points, postpaid with ceiling, advertising subsidised or not, or a combination of these).
At present, a user subscribes to a specific service profile offered by a specific ISP, and he will then be billed for this service profile, for example on the basis of connection time or on a flat rate basis. The costs will of course depend on the features included in the service profile to which the user has subscribed. If the user wants to change to another service profile having different features, he will have to subscribe to the new service profile, and he will then be billed for this profile.
This limits the flexibility with which the user may adapt his service profile to varying demands and/or financial resources. If the user subscribes to a plurality of service profiles at a time, a different user ID will be assigned for each service profile, and the user will receive separate bills for each user ID. This billing system Incurs high administrative costs on behalf of the service provider and lacks transparency from the view point of the user.
The known system is not suitable for frequent changes of the user profile. Even if it may be possible today to use the same User-ID while connecting to multiple services, it is still inconvenient for the user to have to re-authenticate to a new service profile in order to simply change to a better QoS for example (and to disconnect from the previous profile in order to avoid being charged for it in parallel). Today, ISPs are often using flatrate billing because they have been unable to find and implement a customer accepted, well understood billing method for data services. This severely limits their ability to offer differentiated services and therefore severely limits their options to reach profitability. This is especially true for the UMTS service providers, who have taken on high cost which will hardly be recoverable with a flatrate service for internet access.
In the European patent application 01 107 141, the applicant has proposed a method of providing Internet services, which, within the framework of a multi-functional prepaid system, permits the user to change the service profile within a running session. Thus, the session will be subdivided Into a plurality of sub-sessions to which different service profiles apply, and the rate with which the prepaid account of the user is charged will depend on the selected service profile.